This is a blog of illustrator Petri Suni. Browse on and check what he's been up to lately.

03 July 2011

Need of exaggeration

At the moment I'm spending my vacation in NYC. Yesterday, when I was in subway, I saw a dude wearing a cap in a way which was a bit funny. Well, I mean funny from my point of view as we had totally opposite way of wearing caps when I was a teenager. Back then we customized our caps bending the visor as curve as possible and wore them so tight that the cap was nearly blocking the blood circulation. This dude in subway had his cap couple of numbers too big so that the cap rested deep covering the upper parts of his ears. Also the visor was as flat as possible tilting slightly upwards. I couldn't help playing with the idea that, if this dude suddenly turned his head, the cap wouldn't follow.

Later in the evening I tried to sketch that dude with the cap, only realizing that I couldn't achieve the impression as I felt it. As you can see the first sketch in the image is pretty mild. Only when I exaggerated the size of the cap strongly I felt that I could pass on the impression.

This only demonstrates the fact that exaggeration is needed big time when presenting things with comic style illustration.

I also became inspired to play around with a cap way too tight... noting that even an exaggerated version looks pretty normal. So, let's not be too shy when exaggerating things!